UV Unwrapping

During the process of working on my spaceship 3D model, I have included a checkerboard texture onto my model using UV unwrap to apply the texture. The first thing that I had included was the texture using ‘Lambert’ to be able to select colours then clicked on the checkerboard icon next to it which allowed me to select the checkerboard texture. I entered texture mode by pressing the ‘6’ key then entered UV texture editor within the ‘windows’ tab.

Continuing on, I had all the faces of one half of the wing ensuring that the 3D model can be separated into a 2D plane then held down the ‘shift’ key and right click to get some options to pop up in order for me to select the ‘planar map’ tool which made the faces that I had selected into a 2D net as well as made the textures look less stretched.

Next, I need to have the UV selected within the UV map editor so I had held right click on its own so that the menu with the options showing ‘face’, ‘UV’, ‘edges’, etc. Then selected UV to go in UV mode. Now that I am in UV mode, I had to ‘UV unwrap’ the model completely; this is done by holding ‘shift’ and ‘right click’ to get the options menu up again then selecting the box next to ‘Unfold’ to show a menu then un-tick the ‘pack’ box or selecting ‘smooth UV tool’ then dragging until the UV map stops organising itself.

The final step is connecting the edges together. This step is more useful when creating your own textures within Photoshop although you can do this when you are just applying textures. You need to select the edges of the parts of the model that you want to connect (preferably you should connect the edges of parts where you see the model the most) since this will make creating textures slightly easier. Then you simply need to go to the UV editor, hold ‘shift’ and ‘right click’ the select ‘move and sew UVs’. This will connect the edges that you have sewed together; however, it will leave a big gap in the back (or where ever you haven’t sown) which means that if you are drawing a line in a wing of a spaceship then you will basically have a guessing game of how to draw it for the line to go completely around the wing.

(This should roughly give you an example on how it should look.)

You shouldn’t sew both sides together since it will cause them to overlap which will cause any textures to fight over what will be shown and may be problematic when creating your model as the textures will bug out.